Susheila Nasta is a critic and literary activist, editor and broadcaster. Born in Britain in 1953, she spent many years in India, Holland and Germany before returning to Britain and completing her education at the Universities of Kent and London. Before moving to the Open University in 1999, she taught a range of literature courses in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary’s, University of London and was founding Course Director in of the MA in National and International Literatures at the London University Institute of English Studies. She has held teaching posts and visiting fellowships at a number of academic institutions both in the UK and abroad including: the University of Cambridge, Portsmouth, North London, Mumbai, Delhi and the University of the West Indies. She remains: Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary College, University of London, Associate Fellow of the Institute of English Studies and is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Faculty member of the Ferguson Centre. She has served as a consultant and advisor on several national bodies. She was elected member of the AHRC Literature and Language subject panel from 2001-2005. From 2005-2010 she was a member of the Steering Committee for the AHRC Diasporas, Migration and Identity initiative. A judge of several international literary prizes, she was awarded an MBE in 2011 for services to Black and Asian literatures.
Susheila Nasta is well known internationally for her ongoing editorship of Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing which she founded in 1984 and still edits. It celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2009 and gained renewed funding in 2011 from the Arts Council as one of the members of its National Portfolio. It is co-published by Routledge and housed at the Open University in Camden. As Editor of the magazine, she has participated in numerous literary festivals, most recently in Jaipur 2011. Watch an interview on the history of the magazine recorded at the Jaipur festival.
As an active member of the Open University Post-Colonial Research Group, she was Co-Investigator from 2004-07 of the AHRC funded project The Colonial and postcolonial History of the Book. She was awarded further AHRC funding as Principal Investigator and Director from 2007-2010 for a major 3-year collaborative research project, led by the Open University with the University of Oxford and King’s College, London, Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950. Focussing on making evident the substantial contributions that South Asians have made to British life in this early period, it built on some ideas initially explored in her 2002 monograph, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain.
Currently she is leading a major follow-on project to this work on South Asian Britain. Entitled, Beyond the Frame: Indian-British Connections 1850-1950 the new project will further extend the reach and international impact of the research by showcasing visual archives and highlighting the extent to which South Asians have infiltrated, influenced and shaped British intellectual, cultural, political and social life. Funded by the AHRC, the British Library, the Open University, The World Collections Scheme and the British Council, ‘Beyond the Frame’ will tour a new exhibition to India in 2011-12, accompanied by workshops in seven cities for schools and a series of seminars, talks and public events. It will also create easily accessible digital links to UK educational resources and archival sources held at the British Library. The project will culminate in a photographic history of South Asian Britain. Professor Nasta's work on this project is featured as an example of public engagement in the Research Councils UK (RCUK) 'Pathways to Impact' case study.
Susheila Nasta is working at the same time on several independent book projects and essays, including an essay collection, Only Connect: India in Britain and a monograph on transnational modernisms and Asian Bloomsbury.
Apart from the interests signalled above, Susheila Nasta has been developing worldwide scholarly networks in the following areas: Postcolonial and Jewish Diasporas (in collaboration with Professor Bryan Cheyette, Reading and Wasafiri); Muslims and their representation with the AHRC Framing Muslims project (Dr Peter Morey, UEL and Dr Amina Yaqin, SOAS), African Europes (Dr Maya Vinuesa Garcia, Alcala). As a leading authority on the work of Sam Selvon since 1988, she remains literary executor of his estate currently consulting on a film version of The Lonely Londoners. She has authored and edited books on a number of other subjects including Black women’s writing, Life-writing and contemporary writing (follow link for publications).
In her role as Director of several research projects, she has mentored a number of post-doctoral scholars and supervised PhD students on a number of topics including Caribbean and Black-British writing, the literatures of the South Asian diaspora and women’s writing. Current research students are working on Black British Book History, Black British women’s fiction, Partition and women’s writing. She would be interested in supervising future research projects in these areas and postcolonial and international writing more generally.
Whilst Susheila Nasta has taught widely across the field of modern literature, her primary specialisms are in international contemporary writing and the postcolonial literatures especially: Caribbean, African, South Asian and Black-British diasporic writing. She initiated some of the first courses in the UK in the postcolonial literatures at a number of different institutions. Further interests are the importance of pedagogy within the academy, life-writing (especially in relation to women) and the theoretical relationship between creative writing and critical practice.
At the Open University, she has been an active member of several course teams and contributed written materials to A430 Post-Colonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretations, A215 Creative Writing, A300 Twentieth Century Literature: Texts and Debates, A813 Literature and Nation as well as the new MA offerings A815 Literary Afterlives and A816 Literary Horizons.
Susheila Nasta's top 10 cultural journeys featured in The Guardian as part of the celebrations for Wasafiri's 25th anniversary.
The Guardian website features an online timeline based on the Making Britain project research.
Contact: susheila.nasta@open.ac.uk
